>As for garlic, it's amazing stuff out of a jar. I use it on and in everything. I'm not disabled, I'm just lazy and fine with it. The stuff is called Very Lazy Garlic here. And fuck the snobs and elitists.

First they started pushing the canned garlic, then they came for proper knife technique, and ultimately, they outlawed a good chiffonade as far too "ableist"

I think automatically saying that the strong recommendation of a preferred cooking approach is snobbery or elitist is incorrect. The same thing could be said about gentle-rewarming of a steak, vice blasting it in a microwave producing a dry husk.

Some of us are sensitive to certain flavors, and choose not to use preservatives to the extent possible. There is an adjective even used to describe things of quality "hand-made".

There's a fine line between preferring fresh garlic, and turning your nose up at garlic in a jar, and your preferences can be a lower priority. It's very situational.

If I'm making it myself? Fresh. If I'm at a restaurant and paying top dollar? Fresh. Fast food? Lol. At a friends' house being treated to meal? I'm not saying a word whatever they use.

Microwaves particularly are popular targets for snobbish malignment. They're great at doing a lot of things, but many people refuse to use them for anything for the silliest reasons (muh radiation). Of course they're not good for everything, but nothing is good for everything.

I had that argument with someone once and she cooked me a full roast dinner in a wok to prove me wrong.

Get this, I had a foods teacher in high school whose whole lesson plan (And decorations in the class) were a time machine back into the 1980s. She taught us how to cook an entire beef roast in the microwave.

For what it's worth, this is actually pretty popular in Japan where they've got much more limited kitchen space and often the only cooking appliance available to people is a microwave.

It requires a lot more basting and probably a larger amount of electricity compared to what you'd be doing in a conventional oven (especially if you've got a gas oven in terms of energy costs). It's like 40 mins to do though and it turns out... not bad, though I would absolutely prefer a proper convection oven to better results at around the same amount of time.

Woks are very versatile, but even woks aren't the best tool for every job. You could probably bake a pie in a wok, but I think a pie tin would work better.

No tool being the best tool for every job is one of my core truths (and is perhaps its own sole exception.) I think it's true for any class of tool you can think of; kitchen tools, construction or manufacturing tools, software, even ideologies (which are tools for making sense of the world.) Some tools are more versatile than others, and some are basically worthless even for their intended use. But even a tool that could be used for virtually anything (in that tool's natural domain) will never be the best tool for all of those things. I could bake a pie in a wok or make mashed potatoes with a knife; those are very versatile tools. But there are better tools for both, like pie tins and potato mashers.

Agreed.

I hold oscilloscopes and santoku knives with the same regard :)

The microwaves Starbucks used are really good. The average home microwave is great at steaming things in a closed or mostly closed container and mediocre at best at other tasks

I find inverter microwaves are much better at reheating - you can set it to say 30% power which lets the heat conduct through the food better whereas older microwaves would blast at full power 30% of the time resulting in the usual inconsistent heating where one part is overcooked and the other part cold.

Of course lower power means it takes longer, but its still much more convenient to put something in a microwave vs getting a pot out.

I'll have to give it a try. All of the jarred garlic I've tried tastes too much of the preservative, usually ascorbic acid. I don't have any objection to the preservative; it's just a flavor I wasn't expecting and didn't want.

Thanks for the tip.

One of the biggest problems with jarred garlic is the fact that it is often wet, and in a preservative with a flavor that imparts to the food. Because it is not fresh, it will not have the same health benefits either.

This means in order to prepare it, you need to rinse it, dry it, before it is ready to go. Doing these things will mute the flavor even more for what is an already mute flavor compared to fresh garlic.

Given these issues, I would vastly prefer using the garlic tubes more commonly found in Europe, than I would a wet can or wet jarred garlic. Garlic tubes are fresh, preserve well, and in many cases have that pungent ajoene and allicin still present that give it a zing!

To add to this, I would prefer using a dried garlic spice over a can of jarred garlic if forced into deciding between the worst of most garlic options.

The kind I’ve seen is in olive oil. There’s no rinsing and drying. You just scoop it into the pan.

prepend says >The kind I’ve seen is in olive oil. There’s no rinsing and drying. You just scoop it into the pan.<

Sounds really good. But FWIW there have been incidents where people ate garlic stored in oil for too long and died of botulinium poisoning.

https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Can-you-get-botulism-from-gar...

FTFA:

>Research performed by the University of Georgia confirmed that mixtures of garlic in oil stored at room temperature are at risk for the development of botulism. Garlic in oil should be made fresh and stored in the refrigerator at 40 °F or lower for no more than 7 days. It may be frozen for several months. Package in glass freezer jars or plastic freezer boxes, leaving ½-inch headspace. Label, date, and freeze.<

Search on Bing for "botulism poisoning from garlic in oil":

https://www.bing.com/search?q=botulism+poisoning+from+garlic...

At the time I had some chopped garlic cloves in oil in the fridge but tossed the lot out since it had been > 1 week since preparation, precisely the scenario where one death had occurred.

Possibly commercial preparations of garlic pastes use preservatives to prevent such an occurrence. It would definitely hurt sales were a customer to croak b/c of botulinium in a product.

BTW I love garlic salt - it improves most anything and is so easy to use.

if you make it yourself without getting to spore-killing temperatures in a cane, yeah. Which brings up the next point - the stuff in a jar is cooked.

That's the stuff I buy. Always good.

#2 really nails the root of the issue. #3 is big too, you can save a lot of money and time and still get basically the same value by recognizing the diminishing returns in any domain.

I've encountered it in work-related discussions, where people would confidently label something as "professional" or "unprofessional". When in fact, it would be a completely arbitrary standard.